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06 March 2011

Can Supporting the Devil be Ethical?

As you know, the Egyptians protesters attacked the Egyptian State SecurityHead Quarters yesterday. During Mubarak's regime the S.S. used to arrest and torture the Egyptian people. They also used to collect information of every singe person or entity in the country. The protesters were able to capture loads of documents from there, one of them revealed [Ar] that they used some kind of software tool called "FinFisher" in order to install malwares into users computers, collect data from there, and hack into their emails. According to the document, this software belongs to a German company called "Gamma Group", and was sold to the S.S. by a local Egyptian company called "MCS".

The question now, is it ethical to do business with tyrants? Let me be more specific here. Let's consider an entity like the Egyptian State Security. Is it just unethical to support them or sell them anything? Or we have to differentiate here between selling them stationary for example, and selling them torturing tools or softwares like this one?

Finally, I have to clarify that no one can be sure of the authenticity of the revealed documents so far. We still have to wait for the official entities in Egypt in order to verify the informations there. So, by all mean, nobody has the right to accuse anybody here. However, this doesn't mean that my questions aren't valid. I really want to know how ethical is it to help in oppression and information stealing. Normally those who write malicious software tools, they write disclaimers somewhere saying that they aren't responsible for any malicious use of their tools. But in our case here, the nature of the tool and the end-user makes such kind of disclaimers unacceptable, if they ever existed.